"The embryo is the Word of God"

I've been reading Richard Grossinger's book Embryos, Galaxies, and Sentient Beings. Here is the description from his site at North Atlantic Books: "Why is the universe conscious? What kindles mind inside matter? Why do fundamentalist sciences and religions never ask these questions? This sequel to Embryogenesis deals with the theoretical issues brought up by Embryogenesis, including: the relationship between thermodynamics/entropy and the emergence of life; a speculative set of embryogenic principles for all creatures on all planets in the cosmos; an explanation and critique of Intelligent Design and a proposal for a more dynamic psychospiritual theory of creature development; a series of alternatives to genetic determinism; a discussion of the relationship between consciousness and matter; an interjection of 9/11 (which occurred during the writing of this book); and many other topics."  


One quote got my attention in my last reading: "The embryo is the word of God." He write about the creation of sentient beings, including an explanation of how each stage of creation, from neural tube through levels of an evolutionary "grid," the embryo expresses the characteristics of that level that it has grown into. This makes me think of what I've learned from Spiritual Philosophy about the design and pattern of all creation - we create ourselves as cellular beings (energy) from the level of growth (evolution) that we have grown into; thus, we begin "where we left off" in terms of our consciousness levels(s).

The pattern is consistent in every act of creation - moment by moment, life to life.

I feel the triggers and sparks in different different energy fields, a bit like firefly sparks lighting up the grids I've lived, created, experienced and have designed to explore as an energy explorer (human being). I am asking what I don't know, what I want to know, how I know what I know and think I know, what mines there are as I tiptoe down the cleared dirt road. It has been cleared but not paved, which actually I prefer. (This is the way of the Original Thinker.) What flowers bloom - it's raining today! Happy New Year!

Evolution :)

Adaptations of "the scream,"
image overlays
to happy moments of carefree
thoughts as clouds drifting
in a blue sky.
You and I are drifting, often wordlessly
dancing slowly, smoothly,
effortlessly in a gentle spin of time,
weaving a web of what will also be
shining strings of light to guide each of us
further in our own time

If you want peace, first Know Thyself.

When we think about what we want out of life, in life, we all have wants and goals, a need to love and be loved, to create. We need to express ourselves. Throughout history we have carved our names, symbols of our presence, of what we can see and what we, as a mind, are trying to understand.  We want to go beyond where we have been.

We start as an infant, pulling ourselves up.

During Thanksgiving I saw my four-year-old niece, who fancies herself a Cinderella for now – and she is a princess. She is charming, pretty, and has a presence, a sense of herself in the world as being entitled to all that is within her magical kingdom – everything she can imagine can be delightful and pleasing, exciting beyond description. She has her questions too. Shoes are not living things, she says with a big smile to her brother, Jack (13), when he tells her his shoes have names and talk to him.

We want life to make sense. As I listen to the news I hear the many ways we are trying to put the pieces of the puzzles of our collective lives together. Along with the heroes, large and small, there are shadows of princes and princesses, kings, queens, jesters, wannabes.  Sex abuse among young boys, kidnapping of girls, trying to pin down the “truth” of our affairs, integrity, character, harassment, courage, strength, love. Getting to a new true level of peace and understanding requires that we understand ourselves better, more deeply, more simply so that we can accept and acknowledge the complexity of our creation as we experience our physical lives.

I’ve been reading Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. He quotes Jobs: “It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.” (343) Jobs’s self-described “spiritual partner,” Jony Ive, described his design philosophy this way: “Simplicity … involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simply, you have to go really deep. … The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.”

Why don’t we do this more with our “human design”?  I’ve also been reading Paul Johnson’s book, Socrates: A Man for our Times. Socrates, as I relate to the personality shared, always operated using his intuition, as Jobs strived to do, yet also was inspired and guided to understand the philosophy of how men (especially, yet also women and children) thought, what motivated men to think, speak, act as they did. The delight of life is in the living. Creating as its own activity, the constant nature of us as human energy beings, began with thinking. Sharing our thoughts and feelings is one of our greatest gifts – as sensory beings, and also as a collective being. As a society we are most moved by the personal triumphs we experience – overcoming adversity to triumph through sharing love, in the form of food, listening, services, experience. This IS sharing the love and truth from our heart and the wisdom of our soul, beyond the sharing of physical possessions or needs. These gifts accumulate within us as love, as the Ethical Values which enhance every other experience we share as human beings.

I’ve been studying Spiritual Philosophy for most of my adult life. I was taught religious philosophy as a child, and encouraged to use my mind, to learn, to eagerly anticipate all of the opportunities life has to offer. I love to hear, to learn, how other minds respond to and create opportunities to live and learn (such as Steve Jobs). When I examine my life of 49 years, I can clearly see many of the cycles of complexity I’ve lived to get to the simplicity of “knowing thyself.” Knowing thyself continues to unfold its eternal beauty with each day that passes, as I am open to its exploration and discovery.  As I know myself, I am more open to others and how they experience life.

While at my brother’s family’s home for Thanksgiving dinner, they invited each of us at the table to share what we are thankful for. I had not been at their home for Thanksgiving dinner before, and I was happy to be there, to appreciate how they spent the day which has always been a day of happiness and being together for our family. I loved listening to each person express how they felt and thought in that moment of appreciation.  These moments go beyond our “everyday moments” to raise our consciousness of each other and the value of carving time in our busy lives to acknowledge the gifts of sharing life and love and how we learn.

The “instant gratification” concept that we are so accustomed to (such as the brawling seen by some in the black Friday rush) is what we know we must go beyond. Such chaos is not acceptable to a collective that consciously aims toward “peace, love, and understanding.”  Reading Kathy Oddenino’s Love, Truth &Perception this morning, I marked this: “Our soul and spirit seek acknowledgment.  We can only give and receive that which we are conscious of as real within ourself and our life.” The energies of love, nurturing, caring, support are an art unto themselves. I’ve taught my intellect to analyze life, experience, information. I understand how this teaching is only one level of learning. There is an end to that road, when the intellect is controlled by ego beliefs that have accumulated throughout my soul experience. Without love, we create conflict which leads to war, in the same way that roadblocks begin in our internal energy grid (nervous system) which can lead to disease. Then we must dig deeper, through the complexity to get to the simplicity of our design. Our design is the energy of Ethical Values – the courage to push on, the joy of sharing life and love in its minutiae, the laughter of a princess whose world is her pearl. To know thyself as I know another in the moment of truth – the best self invites the best self from another, and our best self, our spirit, is always loving. I’m grateful for learning, for all who teach me, every moment.


Reading Carl Zimmer's review of Steven Pinker's new book prompted me. The Better Angels of our Nature? Why not write a Ph.D. thesis on human nature? If we want to know peace, first Know Thyself.

Bones, Whitaker, Wall Street, and Our Collective Memory

As I watch the news report constant images of the changes, and the challenges of and to change, every day in our world, I think about how we create collective images of ourselves through our cultures that are part of our personal and therefore social identity.  If you’re a fan of the show Bones, as I am, you may remember Dr. Temperance Brennan, the scientist on the show whose passion, among others, is anthropology – the behavioral patterns of life, of course including human life.  She defines people’s behavior in anthropological ways – such as when Booth’s girlfriend gives him a tie, Brennan explains to him that she has entered into a new level of relating to him, i.e., entered into a “social contract.”  I love the script for this show and the dynamics of the cast of characters because they’re an interesting and very different bunch of personalities who manage, through their work, to unite with the same focus of solving mysteries that lead to catching criminals. Solving of mysteries requires an open mind, and a passion for discovery, for new knowledge. The characters display this well, and often in a humorous way. Knowledge can be “heavy” (challenging) for us at times when our mind has been accustomed to dessert, snacks, rather than the art of the whole meal and its many benefits (internal/external interactions).  I love a good laugh, and I also love knowledge. I appreciate the way different personalities develop and share laughter and knowledge. As the evolution of television shows and advertisements show too, we are constantly seeking to stimulate our minds, our multiple senses. But what are we learning and how are we using this knowledge? As I heard one young man say in recent news from “Occupy Wall Street,” we as a country have gotten off track of focusing on being our best selves not just for our own selves but as a country. (paraphrasing).

Because my mind has always has a place for certain types of trivia, I “automatically” remember and relate to certain cultural references that are part of my conscious memory bank.  I remember scenes from the Poseidon Adventure film which we saw as kids as vividly as if it were yesterday. I remember lines from films that I enjoyed watching 25 years ago. I have favorite commercials on television that change as new cycles of marketing change. I don’t forget the ads though. They remain in my fond-memories bank. As I’ve learned more about memory and what memory means to us as a human being (eternal energy), I think about different memories of my family, all those I love. Scenes, senses expand as different memories are stimulated in my memory nodes in my brain. I remember the scent of frangipani leaves in our back yard when we were children in Nigeria, the bright blooms and the silky white leaves. I remember expressions on our pet monkey’s face. I remember the handle of the machete that our gardener used. I remember the bloodshot eyes of the friend we called Carpenter.  I remember balling my finger into a fist as I lay in the crib, squinting my eyes into shimmering shades of light as I awoke from sleep.  So much to remember once we begin to appreciate memories and share in the thrill of what they mean to us as evolving energy beings. While watching Piers Morgan interviewing Michael Moore and many others “Live from Occupy Wall Street,” I heard Moore say if you’re a citizen you have to be involved. That’s the job of a responsible citizen. To add the word “responsible” ought to be redundant, but I understand more clearly than ever that our lessons in any given life create for us opportunities to learn to love – ourselves, others, life, growth, change, evolution.  

I’ve also listened to several interviews with Mark Whitaker, Managing Editor of CNN Worldwide, on his new book, My Long Trip Home.  What a fascinating story.  I especially appreciated how he explained going back and interviewing, talking to, people from his early life and family, asking questions about events and people. Initially many of the answers he got were things like, I don’t really remember that.  As he continued asking questions, details began to emerge. Memories revive as we are prompted to think, to remember.  A friend told me recently that she heard someone say People just don’t want to think! As she thought about this comment, she said her experience shows that it isn’t that people don’t want to think, but that we don’t necessarily know how to think. Questions prompt us to think as we remember the lives we have lived. The Ethical Values which make up our human design as spiritual beings are the grid of energy that guides us once we open our mind to learning and appreciating the absolute power of energy as our potential to create through love and the often challenging dynamics of growth and change as a human family. “Living in the moment” doesn’t mean forgetting what has gone before or what will come next – to me it means becoming ever more conscious of All That Is!

What a Wonderful World, beyond the "Formidable Pause"

I am driven to go beyond the undeniable power of Pinter’s “formidable pause,” that is, to go beyond the power of the invisible menacing as the only force which carries us in the ocean of our living dynamic. This is a level of energy that we learn to recognize within us, and then to “harness,” consciously use as a power of Good. This is another image of the creative powers we’ve immortalized in our fables and comics and epics, theatre of life of all kinds. For me, this is one more description of the “shift in consciousness” each mind is seeking and is designed to grow into as its mature self, being its best consciously creative (Ethical) self. What a wonderful world this is! Cue Louis Armstrong  and one more version by Jenny and the Grayman Band. Why not love?

Unfolding

Suddenly I saw in one new moment

Of clarity

How each knot in my string

Has been made, which have held fast

To be and hold the beads

That bejewel me,

Which have unraveled,

Purposes untold or no longer needed.

I dreamed last night of

Another me, several interacting,

One a young thin man, tall with long blondish hair

And a trimmed beard to match. A collector,

One only recently used to opening

His doors to parties of interested

People who traveled his path,

Often not knowing what they were looking

For until proximity made itself known

And there, a right turn beneath some old flowering

Tree leaves, was the well-worn, ancient road

Now reopened for treasure-sharing.

Going Gentle into Morning

Talking with my

Womb brother today, a seashell sound

Of whispering love in simple

Daily words like cars, school, soccer,

Beach, axle, poem-

oh, how cells sing when we let them,

hear them.

Post-hurricane here, high heat there,

Blue sky prevails, and, in Dad’s immortal words,

Time marches on!  Energy interweaving in rainbow

Colors even as flood waters rise in tv news,

Families coming together even as strangers

Find Nature’s awesome power beautiful,

Eternal. One Vermont woman slipped into what had been

A small creek, they said, and now was raging rapids. No one

Said how or why she slipped in, simply that her body was

Found downstream in the morning as assessments

Were made. I think of her, a stranger’s pull

as she changed her human energy form, water-borne.

Godspeed, and paddle well, the soul knows when to sleep

And what we are born for, family trees, the fruit of love.